Email workflow and AI are rapidly becoming critical tools for operations teams in banking, professional services, and large enterprises. Despite major investments in digital transformation, much of the daily operational work in these organisations still arrives through shared inboxes.

Trade breaks are reported by email. Settlement instructions arrive in inboxes. Client onboarding requests are submitted through distribution lists. Documentation, confirmations, and operational queries often pass through shared mailboxes before entering formal systems.

Despite this central role, traditional email clients were never designed to operate as workflow control systems. Over time many organisations have found themselves operating inside what practitioners sometimes describe as unstructured email chaos.

According to research from McKinsey, knowledge workers spend a significant portion of their time managing email and internal communication.

Messages accumulate in shared inboxes. Ownership becomes ambiguous. Tasks are buried inside long email threads. Teams create spreadsheets to track work that their email systems cannot. Managers struggle to gain real time visibility into workload and response times.

The result is not simply inconvenience. In large operational environments this dynamic can create significant financial leakage, operational risk, and lost productivity.

A growing number of firms are now addressing this problem by adding email workflow and AI layers on top of existing email systems. Platforms such as YUDOmail convert operational email into structured workflow cases, allowing organisations to track, analyse, and optimise operational processes.

Operational efficiency improvements through workflow automation are widely discussed by Gartner.

A closer examination of the economics behind email workflow and AI systems reveals that their return on investment typically emerges from four distinct areas: reclaimed operational capacity, risk mitigation, AI readiness, and improved professional services performance.

Reclaiming Operational Capacity with Email Workflow and AI

The most immediate impact of email workflow and AI is improved productivity.

Research consistently shows that knowledge workers spend a large portion of their time managing email. In high volume operational environments the time commitment can be even greater. Teams responsible for reconciliation, custody operations, corporate actions, or client service frequently spend several hours each day reviewing shared inboxes.

Industry research from Deloitte highlights the growing role of AI in enterprise operations.

This effort is rarely captured explicitly in cost models. Yet when translated into full time equivalent labour the numbers become substantial.

A typical banking operations employee costs roughly $80,000 per year when salary, benefits, and overhead are included. If email workflow and AI systems save just two hours per employee per day, that equates to approximately one quarter of a full time role.

In practical terms that represents about $20,000 per employee per year in reclaimed operational capacity.

Scaled across a team of 100 operations staff, the productivity impact approaches $2 million annually. In larger environments with several hundred employees, the potential value can reach many millions of dollars each year.

What appears to be a minor time saving at the individual level becomes significant when multiplied across entire operational divisions.

Reducing Operational Risk with Email Workflow and AI

Efficiency is only part of the equation. In financial services, operational control is often the more critical concern.

Shared inboxes have structural weaknesses that make them difficult to supervise effectively. Emails can remain unanswered, become buried inside long threads, or be assumed to belong to someone else. Without explicit ownership and status tracking, instructions may age unnoticed until clients escalate.

In regulated industries such failures carry real consequences.

Email workflow and AI platforms solve this problem by converting every incoming message into a tracked operational case. Each case is assigned ownership, monitored against service level agreements, and recorded within an auditable history.

Managers gain real time visibility into workloads, response times, and ageing items. Bottlenecks become visible earlier, allowing supervisors to intervene before service failures occur.

In environments subject to strict supervisory and record keeping requirements, such as broker dealer operations, this type of audit trail can significantly reduce compliance and conduct risk.

Preparing Operational Data for AI Using Structured Email Workflow

A third driver of return on investment is emerging from the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence initiatives across the enterprise.

Many organisations have discovered that the success of AI systems depends heavily on the quality and structure of the data they analyse. Raw email threads present a particular challenge. Conversations are fragmented, context is scattered across multiple replies, and instructions are rarely formatted consistently.

As a result AI systems must expend significant computational effort reconstructing context before they can perform meaningful analysis.

When operational email is converted into structured workflow cases the economics change.

Email workflow and AI platforms allow each operational case to be associated with metadata such as client tier, business unit, product category, or priority level.

Instead of analysing chaotic message archives, AI systems can operate on curated operational datasets.

This structure improves accuracy, reduces computational overhead, and allows organisations to identify patterns that can be automated through robotic process automation or AI agents.

In effect, structured email workflow and AI architecture creates the foundation upon which enterprise AI initiatives can operate effectively.

Strengthening Professional Services Performance

The benefits of email workflow and AI are particularly visible in professional services environments.

Consulting firms, legal practices, and outsourcing providers often depend on efficient coordination across distributed teams. When tasks and communications are scattered across inboxes, delivery becomes inconsistent. Deadlines slip, accountability becomes unclear, and revenue leakage can occur.

Industry research from organisations such as McKinsey and Deloitte highlights how operational inefficiencies in communication workflows continue to impact productivity across knowledge driven industries.

Structured workflow tools help address these challenges by standardising task ownership, improving delivery visibility, and ensuring that project related communications are captured within an auditable framework.

Professional services firms that reach higher levels of operational maturity often experience higher utilisation rates, stronger client satisfaction, and improved profitability.

From Tool to Operational Infrastructure

The most advanced organisations are increasingly treating email workflow and AI platforms not merely as productivity tools but as part of their core operational infrastructure.

This shift is reflected in new licensing models that allow enterprises to deploy workflow engines internally, integrate them deeply with existing systems, and build AI capabilities directly on top of their operational data layers.

In such architectures communication data becomes more than a record of past activity. It becomes a strategic operational asset that informs automation, analytics, and operational intelligence.

Converting Communication Chaos into Operational Data

Ultimately the return on investment from email workflow and AI platforms is not limited to productivity improvements.

Their deeper value lies in transforming one of the most chaotic elements of modern organisations into a structured source of operational insight.

When communication becomes structured data, processes become visible.

When processes become visible, they can be improved, automated, and governed.

For organisations seeking to modernise operations and unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence, that transformation may prove far more valuable than any individual efficiency gain.

To see a demonstration of how organisations are implementing email workflow and AI with YUDOmail, please contact yudo@inbotiqa.com.

Why Structuring Operational Email Is a Priority in Banking and Professional Services

Email workflow and AI are rapidly becoming critical tools for operations teams in banking, professional services, and large enterprises. Despite major investments in digital transformation, much of the daily operational work in these organisations still arrives through shared inboxes.

Trade breaks are reported by email. Settlement instructions arrive in inboxes. Client onboarding requests are submitted through distribution lists. Documentation, confirmations, and operational queries often pass through shared mailboxes before entering formal systems.

The strategic ROI of email workflow and AI emerges when organisations convert unstructured email communication into structured operational data.

Despite this central role, traditional email clients were never designed to operate as workflow control systems. Over time, many organisations have found themselves operating inside what some practitioners describe as “unstructured email chaos.”

Messages accumulate in shared inboxes. Ownership becomes ambiguous. Tasks are buried inside long email threads. Teams build spreadsheets to track work that their email systems cannot. Managers struggle to gain real time visibility into workload and response times.

The result is not simply inconvenience. In large operational environments, this dynamic can create significant financial leakage, operational risk, and lost productivity.

A growing number of firms are now attempting to address this problem by adding structured workflow and artificial intelligence layers on top of email. One example is YUDOmail, an enterprise platform designed to convert operational email into structured workflow cases. A closer examination of the economics behind such systems reveals that their return on investment typically emerges from four distinct areas: reclaimed operational capacity, risk mitigation, AI readiness, and improved professional services maturity.

Email workflow and AI platforms allow operational teams to manage high volumes of instructions while maintaining full audit trails and workflow discipline.

For banks and professional services firms, email workflow and AI are becoming foundational infrastructure for operational control.

Reclaiming Operational Capacity

The most immediate impact of structured email workflow is productivity.

Research consistently shows that knowledge workers spend a large portion of their time managing email. In high volume operational environments, the time commitment can be even greater. Teams responsible for reconciliation, custody operations, corporate actions, or client service frequently spend several hours per day reviewing shared mailboxes.

This effort is rarely captured explicitly in cost models. Yet when translated into full time equivalent labour, the numbers become substantial.

A typical banking operations employee costs roughly $80,000 per year when salary, benefits, and overhead are included. If structured workflow technology saves just two hours per employee per day, that equates to approximately one quarter of a full time role.

In practical terms, that represents about $20,000 per employee per year in reclaimed operational capacity.

Scaled across a team of 100 operations staff, the productivity impact approaches $2 million annually. In larger environments with several hundred employees, the potential value can reach many millions of dollars each year.

What appears to be a minor time saving at the individual level becomes significant when multiplied across entire operational divisions.

Reducing Operational Risk

Efficiency, however, is only part of the equation. In financial services, operational control is often the more critical concern.

Shared inboxes have structural weaknesses that make them difficult to supervise effectively. Emails can remain unanswered, become buried inside long threads, or be assumed to belong to someone else. Without explicit ownership and status tracking, instructions may age unnoticed until clients escalate.

In regulated industries, such failures carry real consequences.

Structured workflow systems attempt to solve this problem by converting every incoming email into a tracked case. Each case is assigned ownership, monitored against service level agreements, and recorded in an auditable history.

Managers gain real time visibility into workloads, response times, and ageing items. Bottlenecks become visible earlier, allowing supervisors to intervene before service failures occur.

In environments subject to strict supervisory and record keeping requirements, such as broker dealer operations, this type of audit trail can significantly reduce compliance and conduct risk.

Preparing Operational Data for AI

A third driver of return on investment is emerging from the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence initiatives across the enterprise.

Many organisations have discovered that the success of AI systems depends heavily on the quality and structure of the data they analyse. Raw email threads present a particular challenge. Conversations are fragmented, context is scattered across multiple replies, and instructions are rarely formatted in a consistent way.

As a result, AI systems must expend substantial computational effort reconstructing context before they can perform meaningful analysis.

When operational email is converted into structured cases, the economics change. Each case can be associated with clear metadata such as client tier, business unit, priority level, or product category.

Instead of analysing chaotic message archives, AI systems can operate on curated operational data.

This structure improves accuracy, reduces computational overhead, and allows organisations to identify patterns that can be automated through robotic process automation or AI agents.

In effect, structuring email workflow creates a foundation upon which enterprise AI initiatives can operate more effectively.

Strengthening Professional Services Performance

The impact of workflow maturity is particularly visible in professional services environments.

Consulting firms, legal practices, and outsourcing providers often depend on efficient coordination across distributed teams. When tasks and communications are scattered across inboxes, delivery becomes inconsistent. Deadlines slip, accountability becomes unclear, and revenue leakage can occur.

Industry research suggests that many professional services firms struggle with declining utilisation rates and shrinking margins.

Structured workflow tools can help address these challenges by standardising task ownership, improving delivery visibility, and ensuring that project related communications are captured within an auditable framework.

Firms that reach higher levels of operational maturity often experience higher utilisation, stronger client satisfaction, and improved profitability.

From Tool to Infrastructure

The most advanced organisations are increasingly treating workflow platforms not merely as software tools but as part of their core operational infrastructure.

This shift is reflected in new licensing models that allow enterprises to deploy workflow engines internally, integrate them deeply with existing systems, and build AI capabilities directly on top of their operational data layers.

In such architectures, communication data becomes more than a record of past activity. It becomes a strategic asset that informs automation, analytics, and operational intelligence.

Converting Chaos into Data

Ultimately, the return on investment from email workflow platforms is not limited to productivity improvements.

Their deeper value lies in transforming one of the most chaotic elements of modern organisations into a structured source of operational insight.

When communication becomes structured data, processes become visible. When processes become visible, they can be improved, automated, and governed.

For organisations seeking to modernise operations and unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence, that transformation may prove far more valuable than any individual efficiency gain.

To see a demo of YUDOmail helping organisations achieve this, please contact yudo@inbotiqa.com.

Ludré Stevens, Co founder Inbotiqa, 05 March 2026

The post The Strategic ROI of Email Workflow and AI in Operations appeared first on Inbotiqa - Intelligent Business Email.

Change inside companies is hard, especially when people worry that AI might take their jobs rather than just make it easier.

You hit resistance. Teams are unsure how to tackle it in management chunks, Then the learning curve. Then storming, forming, norming, performing. And sometimes at the end, people are not even sure whether the change delivered value because the before and after are impossible to compare.

With YUDOmail, we make this easy and a natural progress for high volume operational email environments.

A. What Actually Happens in YUDOmail

Let us assume you have never used YUDOmail before. Gere is what happens step by step when an email arrives.

1. Email Is Ingested using our Email Adaptor.

• YUDOmail connects to your shared mailbox. It does not replace Outlook or Gmail. It works with them.
• When an email arrives, YUDOmail ingests it automatically. Nothing changes for your external stakeholders. They still send emails as usual.

2. A Case Is Created

• Instead of leaving the email as a loose item in an inbox, YUDOmail creates a Case.
• A Case is a structured container that includes: The full email thread, All attachments, The subject and participants, Metadata fields such as client name, category, priority, due date, business unit, Status such as Open, In Progress, Waiting, Closed
• Every sent reply to that email is automatically threaded into the same Case.
• No more lost emails. No more forwarding chains. No more private sub conversations. One case. One source of truth.

3. Ownership Is Assigned

Each Case must have an Owner. Ownership is explicit. There is no ambiguity. You always know who is responsible.

This can be:

• A specific person
• system account
• An AI agent
• An RPA bot

4. Workflow Rules Trigger

YUDOmail allows you to define workflow rules.

For example:

• If subject contains SSIs, assign to Settlement Team
• If client tier equals Platinum, set priority to High
• If sentiment equals Negative, escalate to Manager
• If received after hours, set due date to next business morning

These rules can be simple or sophisticated. They are transparent and measurable.

5. AI Enhances the Case

Now the incremental AI layer begins.

When the Case is created, YUDOmail can:

• Summarize the case
• Extract key entities
• Suggest next steps
• Surface historical similar cases
• Pre draft a response

The summary appears inside the Case.

For example: Case Summary Counterparty requests confirmation of Standard Settlement Instructions for EUR trade settling today. Due date set to today. Suggested Next Steps Retrieve SSIs for counterparty X in EUR. Confirm via template response. Attach PDF if required. The human does not lose control. They gain context.

6. Comments and Internal Chat

Inside the Case, team members can:

• Add internal comments
• Tag colleagues
• Ask questions
• Share documents
• Collaborate in real time

These comments are not visible to the external client. They are fully auditable and permanently linked to the Case. No more side WhatsApps. No more separate Teams threads. Everything stays inside the workflow container.

7. Audit Trail Records Who Did What

Every action in YUDOmail is recorded in the audit trail. The system shows clearly:

• Who created the Case
• Which rule assigned it
• When the owner accepted it
• Who commented
• Whether AI generated a summary
• Whether a bot responded
• When the email reply was sent
• When the Case was closed

And crucially: It records whether the action was performed by:

• System
• AI
• Human
• Bot

This is critical for risk, compliance, and governance. You can see the full lifecycle of work.

Example 1. Investment Banking Middle Office

Imagine a European shared mailbox. Ten people in London. Ten people in Manila. High volume inflow.

An email arrives: Please confirm your Standard Settlement Instructions for this upcoming trade.

Here is what happens in YUDOmail.

1. Email arrives.
2. Case is created automatically.
3. Rule detects SSIs in subject.
4. Case assigned to Settlement Queue.
5. Due date set to Today.
6. AI summarizes request.
7. Suggested next steps displayed.

A team member accepts the Case.

They retrieve SSIs. Reply. Close the Case.

At month end, management reports show:

• 200 SSI confirmation requests
• Average turnaround time
• SLA compliance
• Sentiment score
• Escalation rate

Now leadership sees a pattern. Instead of a big bang AI transformation, they make one decision.

New rule: If subject contains SSIs, assign to RPA Bot.

Now:

• Email arrives
• Case created
• Assigned to Bot
• Bot retrieves SSIs
• Bot sends template reply
• Case closed
• Audit trail records Bot action

Humans focus on exceptions. No disruption. No panic. Incremental automation.

Example 2. Medium Sized Financial Services Firm

A firm with 50 staff and a shared Client Services inbox. They start simple.

Phase 1 Just use YUDOmail to create Cases and assign owners.

Already they gain:

• Visibility
• Clear accountability
• Measurable SLAs
• No lost emails

Phase 2 Turn on AI summarization and suggested next steps.

Now new joiners ramp up faster. Knowledge is surfaced automatically. Training burden reduces.

Phase 3 Introduce sentiment scoring.

Each Case is rated:

• Positive
• Neutral
• Negative

Management dashboards show:

• Which clients are becoming frustrated
• Which teams respond poorly
• Where tensions are building

This is not just workflow. This is risk management and client experience intelligence.

Phase 4 Automate specific repeatable categories.

Not everything. Only where data supports it.

Incrementally. Controlled. Measured.

B. Why This Matters

AI in organizations fails when it is forced top down. Big bang. Mass retraining. Radical process shifts. Fear of job loss. YUDOmail takes a different path.

It does not remove email. It structures it. It makes it measurable. It makes it governable. It makes it improvable.

Then, once you can measure it, you can:

• Improve it
• Assist it with AI
• Automate parts of it
• Eliminate unnecessary work
• Proactively communicate

And because every action is logged in the audit trail, you always retain control.

You can see: System did this. AI suggested that. Bot responded here. Human approved there. That clarity builds trust.

Climbing the Mountain

You do not need to jump from full human email to no human email. Email will remain.

But with YUDOmail:

• Email becomes structured data
• Data becomes insight
• Insight becomes automation
• Automation becomes competitive advantage

And you climb that mountain step by step. Not by jumping off a cliff.

C. Infrastructure Advantage: Sentiment and Structured Intelligence

There is another layer that deserves attention. Sentiment scoring is the obvious one. At a basic level, sentiment analysis uses a language model to determine whether an email is positive, neutral, or negative. That score can then be averaged across the entire case.

This already provides value. You can see whether tensions are building with a counterparty. You can correlate negative tone with response times. You can identify teams operating under stress. But sentiment is only the visible surface.

The deeper advantage lies in structure. Large language models consume significant computational power trying to make sense of unstructured communication. They must interpret fragmented email threads, reconstruct context, identify ownership, detect resolution, and infer outcomes.

In most organisations, that work is done repeatedly, from scratch, by the model. In YUDOmail, that work has already been done.

Emails are already threaded into coherent cases. Chats are already linked. Ownership is already defined. Resolution is already recorded. Sentiment is already scored. Case summaries are already generated.

The communication history is not raw text. It is structured operational intelligence. That structure changes the economics and the power of AI. Instead of asking an enterprise LLM to reconstruct context from millions of fragmented emails, you can feed it curated, structured case data.

This reduces computational overhead. It increases accuracy. It lowers hallucination risk. And it accelerates training.

An enterprise can ingest YUDOmail’s structured case data into its own machine learning infrastructure to: Develop risk models. Train domain specific agents. Identify emerging operational issues. Improve workflow design. Refine client intelligence. You are not asking AI to discover meaning from chaos. You are feeding it organised knowledge.

AI performance is directly related to input quality. Structured communication is exponentially more valuable than raw email archives. And once that structured layer exists, the enterprise gains leverage far beyond simple automation.

That is how AI should enter the enterprise. Incrementally. Controlled. Measured. Led by data. Governed by design.

That is YUDOmail iNBOTiQA

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By Amy Dron – Inbotiqa, Corporate Communications

Inbotiqa has been shortlisted for a second award in 2019, the Best Enterprise Project category of the third annual National Technology Awards. Organised by National Technology News, the National Technology Awards (NTA) are a celebration of technology in the year. The awards recognise the pioneers of new technology and help drive standards and encourage excellence.

The announcement comes while Inbotiqa is in the 2019 Barclays Accelerator powered by Techstars in London. One of only 10 startups chosen each year, Inbotiqa was selected from 740 applicants from 67 countries to take its place on the world-renowned accelerator programme at Rise, located near Silicon Roundabout in Old Street.

The NTA Best Enterprise Project category sought outstanding examples of how technology has been harnessed to solve enterprise-wide issues. From banking to retail, broadcast to manufacturing, shortlisted companies were required to combine insight and implementation of technology to the highest standards. The winner will be announced at the awards ceremony in May.

Inbotiqa has also been shortlisted in the Best Use of Data & Analytics category in the FStech Awards 2019, the winner of which will be revealed in March.

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By Amy Dron – Inbotiqa, Corporate Communications

Inbotiqa has been shortlisted in the Best Use of Data and Analytics category in the FStech Awards 2019. Now in their 19th year, the FStech Awards recognise excellence and innovation in the field of information technology within the UK and EMEA financial services sector.

In the Best Use of Data and Analytics category, Inbotiqa has been shortlisted alongside companies including HSBC, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse international. The category recognises that financial services companies have never had so much data at their fingertips, providing a vast pool of customer and business information that can be used to generate insights, tailor product offerings, drive business efficiencies or develop entirely new financial platforms or ways of delivering services.

The award recognises a company, solution or project that demonstrates the innovative and large-scale use of data and analytics to the benefit of a business, their customers or the financial industry’s infrastructure. Winners will be announced on the 21 March 2019 at a gala dinner at London’s Marriott Hotel in Grosvenor Square.

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The struggle to stay on top of the beast that is email can feel relentless. Perhaps it’s time to reinvent the strategy so we’re no longer fighting email, but taming it…

It’s hard to think of anyone in the back-office ecosystem who would not be familiar with the daily battle to keep a handle on out-of-control emails in inboxes and shared mailboxes. The constant struggle of ensuring emails are processed on time, preventing any being missed, managing folders efficiently, staying complaints amid myriad rules and regulations, and so on, saps resources and draws focuses away from tasks that truly add value.

As such, it’s rightly so that most back-office management and technology teams look to replace email. They generally do so by creating online portals to submit instructions, as opposed to emailing them. This is realised by building execution-management tools and user interfaces which are implemented using custom-built workflow systems or creating them in-house (an expensive option).

While all of these solutions work to a degree, they only resolve a slice of the issues around high-volume email traffic. They also tend to add a fair amount of additional manual work. All the while, our inboxes and shared mailboxes remain open on our desktops as they consistently contain work that is non-standard, of a high priority or introduces a new request or function that has not yet been prioritised.

What can often be forgotten are the intrinsic benefits of email. These are, after all, why billions of emails are sent each and every day, and why email remains such a popular form of business communication. Email is flexible in terms of what it can be used for, therefore ideal in complex business environments; it’s universally used – internally by businesses and externally between them and their customers; and it’s an official communication channel, used to convey information formally and on record with stakeholders. These are all great benefits.

The ideal solution, therefore, is to tame email by fixing the pain points, not fighting them. The main pain points being: how to track ownership; how to do this across entire organisations; and how to extract useful metrics and analytics out of this valuable data. Once this is possible, it enables the effective management of email-based processes through allocated task ownership. It also generates real-time data to identify slices of work within email and migrate them to specialist systems.

At iNBOTiQA, we created our YUDOmail solution with all this in mind. In a previous blog, our Director of Technology discusses in more detail the journey that has led us to the next step in taming the back-office email beast: YUDOsmart. With YUDOmail and YUDOsmart, we tame the beast that is email, then harness it to extract the latent power within, helping to cuts costs, boost productivity, reduce risk and improve customer service. It is possible to give up the fight and enjoy the benefits of tamed emails and inboxes.

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One of our Tier 1 banking clients just completed their Inbotiqa YUDOmail pilot. A fascinating insight was brought to light by a very specific metric: the chase rates of both internal and external counterparties (i.e. how many follow follow-ups or reminders were sent) and who they had to chase. The client shared with us a few recurring themes around this valuable discovery so we tested it with some of our other clients, including non-banking ones.  This revealed a number of recurring behaviour patterns across the board, all of which can be identified and resolved with the volumes metric from YUDOmail.

Here, we are pleased to share some lessons we gained from this revealing exercise.

Inbound chaser emails: Noise and recurring issues

We define an inbound chaser email as an inbound email following a previous inbound email on the same topic and from the same email address. We uncovered two key inbound-chaser themes.

Firstly, a significant number of inbound chaser emails are not only system generated, they are also sent within one hour of the original email. These are deemed as ‘noise’ chasers by Inbotiqa clients. With the volumes metric in YUDOmail, our clients can request the generators of these emails to switch them off or to increase the chasing interval to a reasonable time. This small change means that human resources are not distracted from solving the actual underlying issues by interim noise.

The second was the ability to identify the root causes of ‘true’ chasers. Our clients were able to identify recurring chasers from the same sources, which indicated a root issue on their side. With this information, they were able to eliminate root causes thereby removing the need for the initial query as well as the chasers.

Outbound chasing and repeat offenders

Outbound chasers are defined as “an outbound email following another outbound email on the same topic and to the same email address”. A major theme emerged from our data: most chasing was needed for repeat offenders. The YUDOmail metrics revealed two indicators: Firstly, often 80% of chasers where sent to only a handful of repeat offenders. Secondly, that multiple chasers were needed to an even smaller recurring group of repeat offenders.

Inbotiqa clients are therefore able to influence staff behaviour so that the number of chaser emails required to resolve an issue can be reduced, improving task turnaround time and operational efficiency. Another key benefit of YUDOmail’s data is that not only does it tell you who needs chasing – it also exposes the types of issues they are being chased about. This allows our clients to reach out to repeat offenders to resolve any specific recurring issues and eliminate those root causes.

Actionable analytics and metrics

The beauty is that these simple metrics, namely the volumes of inbound and outbound chasers, and who and which issues they involve, provide immediately actionable metrics. These can then be used to:

• Reduce email volumes which in turn frees up valuable human resources to do real work;
• Identify recurring issues within your organisation and fix root causes, thereby preventing issues arising in the first place; and
• Enable positive behaviour change among both internal and external stakeholders.

The bottom line is that fixing root causes and enabling behaviour change means fewer breaks, fewer emails and happier clients.

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The negative effects on managers of keeping up with email traffic were laid bare in recently published research from Michigan State University (MSU). In an article on the institution’s website, “Is Email evil? Bosses are getting boxed in by their inboxes”, lead researcher, MSU management professor Russell Johnson, discusses the research and how distractions from email interruptions impact managers, their productivity, and their ability to lead. Effective email management is at the heart of our Inbotiqa YUDOmail platform so we read the findings with great interest.

Published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the MSU research ‘Boxed in by your inbox: Implications of daily e-mail demands for managers’ leadership behaviours found that while employees spend more than 90 minutes per day recovering from email interruptions, managers are similarly afflicted but with further-reaching implications. Johnson, an associate professor in the Department for Management in MSU’s Broad College, describes how recovering from such interruptions not only means managers fail to meet goals. It also leads to neglect of their responsibilities as managers meaning that subordinates lack the leadership behaviour they need to thrive.

To compound matters further, the research also found that managers recover from feeling overwhelmed and unproductive due to email demands by limiting their leader behaviours and pivoting to tactical duties; and that this action is strategic and intentional as it makes managers feel more productive. Employees and thus outcomes suffer from a lack of leadership behaviour, which Johnson describes as relating to motivating and inspiring subordinates, conveying why work tasks are important, and talking optimistically about the future. He went on to say that there was a strong correlation between leader behaviour and employee performance.

At Inbotiqa, we recognise and help clients realise the benefits of effective email management, seeing dramatic reductions of 55% in the time spent on email management once our Intelligent Business Email platform has been implemented.  Turnaround times are reduced through clear task allocation and performance management, while analytics reduce email volumes by eliminating unnecessary system-generated emails while identifying root causes of chaser emails.

Valuable academic research like that produced by MSU highlights the range of negative effects resulting from ‘email overload’, both direct and knock-on. With the advances in effective email management and analytics that YUDOsmart brings to the Inbotiqa platform, we’re looking forward to further contributing to reducing email traffic and the significant negative effects such high volumes can have on our clients’ managers, teams and productivity.

Citation: “Boxed in by your inbox: Implications of daily e-mail demands for managers’ leadership behaviors,” Christopher C. Rosen, Lauren S. Simon, Ravi S. Gajendran, Russell E. Johnson, Hun Whee Lee, and Szu-Han (Joanna) Lin. Journal of Applied Psychology, Sep 17, 2018. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0000343.

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Before embarking on my journey with Inbotiqa, I spent several years as a technologist in charge of developing and managing workflow solutions in the banking industry. My team was often responsible for automating business processes that involved collaboration between several groups.

Whether it was processing loan applications, trades or even responding to customers’ queries, it was as if the data associated with that process was being passed through, to borrow from manufacturing paradigm, an ‘assembly line’. The various groups involved were the ‘skilled craftsmen’, tasked with doing parts of the assembly.

But what about the conveyor? – the other key component of the assembly line.

As desktop computers replaced typewriters, email became the conveyor. Email itself has now been around for more than two decades and is now omnipresent, an essential tool for enterprises. An email address is one of the first resources that is allotted to a new employee. All sorts of communications, from reports and approvals to holiday applications, are routed via email.

Email addresses are not limited to personal work email addresses. Teams or sometimes even whole divisions and departments have email addresses and distribution lists to allow for dissemination of information beyond just individuals. Often, such email addresses become essential parts of business processes. Then each email that arrives on such a team email address is not just a piece of communication – it is a task or a to-do. As such, it has implicit requirements such as an expectation of response or a timeliness of completing the action.

However, email lacks inbuilt support for the distribution of work, reporting or audit. Of course, here the argument in favour email is that it always meant to be a channel for the dissemination of information – and it is extremely efficient at that. That said, these additional expectations have led businesses to look for alternative solutions to cater to these expectations. Workflow solutions cater to exactly this need, whether readymade or developed in-house.

I spent years developing several such solutions, which almost always catered to a specific problem or businesses process. I call these “point” solutions. Each point solution worked efficiently for the specific process and improved efficiency, time savings, cost savings and so on.

“Despite moving the core process out of email

into a point solution, we ended up

integrating the point solution with email.”

 

These point solutions would result in applications that would have a separate internal conveyor for flow of information. End users were expected to look into the application for information associated with their specific business process. Over time, we observed that we would get requests from end users such as notifications of new tasks and status changes – via email. There were even cases where the arrival of an email at some specific address was the starting point of a process.

Then there were managers who would rather check reports delivered to their email account than check them by opening the business application. So despite moving the core process out of email into a point solution, we ended up integrating the point solution with email.

Today, most employees in large organizations start the day by checking their email. It’s an essential part of every employee’s routine. The aforementioned problems with email continue to exist and so do the point solutions that attempt to solve them. It’s almost as if there is an impending need for convergence of both.

At Inbotiqa, we recognized this need for convergence of email and workflow. One of our first steps in product development was a seamless integration with email. YUDOmail now provides not only a workflow solution but something that can totally replace team mailboxes or distribution lists. YUDOmail was not the first solution to address this need, but it created the next evolutionary step. And with the addition of YUDOsmart to the Inbotiqa platform, the next leap is made. Suffice to say, as email itself enters its 50s (as suggested by wiki entry on email) the stage is set for some exciting changes.

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As a result of striving for an empty inbox (we’ll call this “fake inbox zero”), some people resort to methods such as:

• Going nuclear, whereby the user just clears all items by archiving and/or deleting.
• Running a search/filter on specific items as and when needed and letting the other items pile up, making the process more arduous each time around. Think of it like never cleaning your room, but knowing “that special place” you leave your keys!
• Avoiding it altogether, mistaking ignorance for bliss.

Alright, so that’s all fine and good if it’s your own personal inbox. Sure, maybe the latest deals are just more, unnecessary noise and you really don’t need any more inspirational quotes to lighten up your day… but what about business!?

What about when risk is involved, along with customer satisfaction, work related events and other deadlines you have coming up? What about internal email/messaging and org-wide notices?

Well, everything has its time, place and responsible persons. Enter YUDOmail. YUDOmail enables businesses and teams to achieve Inbox Zero WITHOUT going nuclear, deleting stuff you shouldn’t, and losing things you have to follow up on.

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Remember when you first started using email? If you were an early user (pre-1990) you were probably getting 5-10 emails a day and co-workers still picked up the phone or stopped by your office to ask you for something. It was fairly easy to manage your email inbox.

Now email has become a chore. What was once used strictly as a communications tool has now become the central place from which work is received, managed and delegated in organizations. So in addition to having more emails to deal with (the recent reported average is 200 emails a day), your email inbox is a storehouse of “to-dos”, “to-reads” and items of “indeterminate status.” The real problem for users and the companies they work for is that those important tasks are often getting missed because they get buried in the daily flood of emails and email programs alone do not have sufficient capability to effectively manage tasks.

Why Email is Not a Task Management Tool

When we made YuDoMail available to beta testers we uncovered seven specific issues that users experience with task management in email.

1. Tracking: Users find it difficult to keeping track of lots of concurrent actions: One’s own to-dos and to-dos one expects from others.

2. Prioritizing: Limited capability to mark things as important or outstanding amongst the less important items.

3. Managing: Email alone does not make it easy to manage activity extending over time or keep track of threads of activity and  discussions.

4. Monitoring: No way to monitor deadlines and reminders, which may be associated with particular messages or other content, and there is no closed-loop process.

5. Organizing: Difficult to collate related items (e.g., an extended thread) and associated files and links.

6. Reporting: A task oriented overview, at a glance, rather than scrolling around and inspecting folders, is non-existent.

7. Analyzing: No ability to view request volumes, outstanding requests and turnaround times at the individual and team level, as well as important metrics to show trends and support root cause analysis.

The exciting outcome for our beta testers is that they were able to overcome all of these issues using YuDoMail. For the first time teams had complete visibility into the request status, for themselves and for their team, to drive accountability and improve productivity. If you’re interested in giving YuDoMail a test drive, click here. If you’re already a YuDoMail users, we would love to hear your task management stories and tips.

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